Welcome to NewsFile, your weekly round up newsy tidbits and happenings from the world of contemporary ceramic art and contemporary ceramics. We dive in with a solid gold jab at the White House.
The Guggenheim’s Gilded Jab at the White House
The Washington Post reports, the Guggenheim Museum gave a “sick burn” to the White House last week when they refused a request for a Van Gogh painting, instead offered a fully functional gold toilet by Italian artist and provocateur Maurizio Cattelan called America. Though typically characterized by ceramic, with fancier luxury toilets featuring heated components and more, this run-of-the-mill looking loo is cast in 18-karat gold.
It is a golden version of the kind of toilet you might find in a public school or airport. The use of gold satirizes not just American values but references a long discourse about the vanity of wealth, the belief of rich people that everything they do is transmogrified by money. Saddam Hussein, it was reported after the fall of his regime, had golden toilets, or at least gold-plated toilets.
In the words of disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, “it’s f***ing golden.”
Read more here.
Documentary Sheds Light on Absurdity of Art as Commodity
The Price of Everything, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, explores the dynamics at play in pricing the priceless, art as commodity.
Basquiat paintings regularly fetch tens of millions of dollars, and the recent sale of a little-known Da Vinci topped $450 million—but what forces are driving the white-hot art market? Who assigns and who pays these astronomical sums? What currency adequately measures art’s value? The Price of Everything leads us into a rarefied labyrinth of galleries, studios, and auction houses to wrestle with these questions and explore what society loses and gains when art becomes a rich person’s commodity.
Read more here.
American Ceramic Society’s New Digital Library
Our friends over at the American Ceramic Society created an entire library of past ACerS Bulletin issues—97 volumes, dating all the way back to 1922. The archive is now available online in a fully searchable and downloadable Bulletin Archive Online digital database.
The ACerS Bulletin—the official membership magazine of The American Ceramic Society—highlights the industry’s latest news and trends, with brief research updates, captivating feature articles, in-depth industry news, and more.
Learn more here and browse the database.
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